October Sky

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT OCTOBER SKY - PAGE 5

Notre Dame football is a matter of belief this season, and right now I'm an agnostic waiting for the next flight out to atheism. While we wait for the lightning bolt to strike me down, let's discuss the Irish's 31-7 victory Saturday over Stanford like adults, meaning no vigilante wedgies, please. Notre Dame, a team with trace levels of offense and an opportunistic defense, is 5-0. The Associated Press and USA Today/ESPN each rank the Irish ninth, and the New York Times computer rankings have them first, proving that computers are just as susceptible to substance abuse as humans are. If Notre Dame is the best team in the nation--or the ninth-best team in the nation--then I'm on People magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People list.

They were Harry Stuhldreher, Jim Crowley, Don Miller and Elmer Layden, but you probably know them as Notre Dame's Four Horsemen of the 1920s. "Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again," Grantland Rice wrote after a 13-7 upset of Army. "In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. Those are only aliases." We bring you a baseball version of these literary horsemen of the Apocalypse. They are Albert Pujols, Joe Mauer, Prince Fielder and Adrian Gonzalez.

I'm not exactly sure how I ended up as a voter in this year's Heisman Trophy balloting, but the job does come with a free bumper sticker, so I'm not complaining. Next year, maybe oven mitts. I did not have a good year, I'll be the first to admit. I came in overweight, mixed a few metaphors and roughed up the boss for disrespecting me. It was an uphill battle without a paddle. In the NBA, this gets me a better contract. Here, it gets me a Heisman ballot. I was wondering whether my past performance might have caught someone's eye at the Downtown Athletic Club, but I realized, no, those weren't very good either.

The high point of 1999 for many people in Hollywood came not with the release of "Star Wars: Episode 1 -- The Phantom Menace" or even the promise of another year of record box-office returns. It came when Disney boss Michael Eisner was forced to admit, in court that he once characterized former friend and colleague Jeffrey Katzenberg as a "little midget." That and other embarrassing admissions in the case dubbed Katz vs. Mouse eventually precipitated a huge settlement and icy shivers on Wall Street.

They examined the flags atop Notre Dame Stadium and looked to the sky above and it was hard to believe--even for the fiercest Fighting Irish believer--that they were seeing what they saw. It was a blue-gray October sky, benign for much of the day, three-quarters of a century to the week after the one above New York's Polo Grounds and Notre Dame's Four Horsemen framed football history. But then its low-hung rain clouds became menacing and unpredictable. At the start of the fourth quarter, with Southern California about to benefit from the breeze after an impressive 21-point lead had begun to disappear, everyone in Notre Dame Stadium seemed to understand that the heavens, suddenly, were taking sides.

This feature is intended to help parents learn about movies their children might want to see. When Doug Funnie discovers there's a monster in polluted Lucky Duck Lake, he conspires with his best pal, Skeeter, to expose the truth. In the process, he discovers unethical behavior by one of Bluffington's leading citizens. "Doug's 1st Movie" is a charming story about those awkward preteen years and trying to be cool and fit in with your peers. It's filled with honest moments, realistic dialogue, lessons about valuing life and friends, and subtle messages about how important truth is. Though this animated film may be a little too simple and mundane for kids' tastes these days, children who enjoy the cartoon character will like it, and those ages 4 to 12 will appreciate it most.

"Hidalgo," based on the story of distance rider Frank Hopkins and his legendary mustang Hidalgo, who competed in the Ocean of Fire, a dangerous survival race in the Arabian desert, is a sometimes stirring, sometimes preposterous movie. Filled with spectacular scenery and howling nonsense, it's a would-be mix of "Seabiscuit" and "Lawrence of Arabia" that turns into something closer to "The Mummy" on horseback. The actual event must have been fascinating: a 3,000-mile race across the desert in which half the participants, usually champion Bedouin riders on pure-bred Arabian horses, routinely died before the finish line.

Chris Cooper, "Adaptation" - Role details: John Laroche is a character from "The Orchid Thief" book, which is waiting to be adapted into a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman. - Critic quote: "Expect Oscar to chase Cooper. Best known for character roles ('American Beauty'), he gives a bust-out star performance that brims with magnetism (not easy if you're acting with no front teeth)." --Peter Travers, Rolling Stone - Hidden gem: "October Sky" was mostly about Homer Hickham as a boy, but go back and pay particular attention to Cooper as Homer's dad, who is torn between his pride and his frustration.

This feature is intended to help parents learn about movies their children might want to see. In "Analyze This" (rated R), Ben Sobol (Billy Crystal) is a divorced New York psychiatrist about to get married and begin a new life. Paul Vitti (Robert De Niro) is a New York gangster who's about to become leader of his crime family when he suddenly starts to get anxiety attacks. He visits Paul, orders him to become his therapist and demands that he be on call 24 hours a day in case he needs him. Despite Ben's protests, Paul makes him an offer he can't refuse, and the result is humorous pandemonium.

In "Jurassic Park III"--the third installment of Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg's raging dinosaur series--original star Sam Neill returns. But Spielberg and Crichton are mostly absent and something seems to have gone seriously wrong with Darwin's theory of natural selection. The movie, beautifully produced and smashingly designed, full of great action scenes and spectacular beasts, is yet another catalog of digital and animatronic marvels. It is directed by Joe Johnston ("Honey, I Shrunk the Kids")